Today the Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced that less than five percent of the world’s IPv4 addresses remain unallocated. The last two blocks of IPv4 addresses to be assigned went to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region, just nine months ago and that took availability down to below 10% . Since then, over 200 million IPv4 addresses have been allocated from IANA to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Most of you can do the math, at that rate we will run out of IPv4 addresses before this time next year.

So a lot of you are like, this is just a lot of tech mumbo jumbo, why does it matter to me? When you hit sites like this one through links like http://zoknowsgaming.com you are really only seeing a mask if you will for the numeric addresses that actually get you where you want to go when you click a url. The issues that would occur should we run out of addresses before action is taken to mitigate the problem could be painful to the say the least. Some believe that it could trigger a technology dash that could threaten the very stability and security of the Internet itself. The good news is that the tech world has been aware of this problem for years and they already know the answer.

IPv6 is the “next generation” of the Internet Protocol, providing a hugely expanded address space, which should allow the Internet to continue to grow well into the next several decades with a mind boggling 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible IPv6 addresses. Several companies have already started work to facilitate an easy transition over to IPv6 once all the IPv4 addresses are depleted but they aren’t there yet. Without an answer to this problem, then sites currently using IPv4 addresses won’t be able to talk to newer sites using IPv6 addresses. While this is an issue, I think the minds involved will do what’s necessary to prevent the catastrophe that some think could happen, it wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest to let something like that happen. Stay tuned and we will keep you informed on this developing issue.

I am the Co-Ceo of DLT Digital Media. We are a company that is focused on developing new and innovative web properties in addition to developing WordPress based web sites for others. But before I was all that, I was a gamer.